Although the punitive character of the U.S. immigration enforcement regime has been noted, less research has inquired into the productivity of punishment beyond detention and deportation, the particular rationale of punishment, and the way in which punitive enforcement shapes (rather than targets) race. By analyzing antimigrant rhetoric and the practices of immigration enforcement, I argue that punishment is best understood as a violent material reassertion of the narrative of the United States as a nation of laws. My biopolitical approach to immigration innovates by (1) conceptualizing the process through which race becomes a biopolitical divide, (2) noting that the construction of race also shapes the meaning of whiteness, and (3) showing the particular ways in which sovereignty, discipline, and biopower are combined in the U.S. immigration enforcement regime. I illustrate these claims by examining policies and practices that characterize contemporary immigration enforcement and find that punishment fulfills functions of regeneration, discipline, or moralization, among others, and treats different subpopulations of migrants differently. Even inclusionary interventions involve processes of subjectification among the beneficiaries. I conclude by examining the implications of this framework for understanding the current political stalemate.
This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics.
This article theorizes the circulation of violence in the realms of immigration and labor. Through Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the relationship between racial violence and law, and note that although violence can support the authority of law, excessive violence makes law vulnerable to decay. This tension between authority and excess is eased by humanitarianism. I find clues for disrupting this circulation in Benjamin’s twin notions of the real state of exception and the general strike, introduced two decades apart and invested in theorizing how labor and other marginalized groups threaten the stability of law supported by violence. This reconstruction proceeds alongside an examination of the contemporary US regime of immigration enforcement, which combines the excessive violence of detention and deportation with marginal humanitarian adjustments, which ultimately legitimate violence. On the disruptive side, a Benjaminian reading of labor activism by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers offers three dimensions of emancipatory politics: (a) practices of refusal (to engage on the terms of the immigration debate), (b) the establishment of historical constellations (of racial regulation of labor constitutive of law), and (c) divine violence (through exposure of lawful violence in the food production chain).
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